BBQ or Mexican?

You have all played the game before, if you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life what would it be? The funny thing is most people have an answer for this, but if we think abut it, eating the same thing for a week would drive us crazy.

I have been back in Texas for a few days now and there are basically two types of food we survive on here: BBQ and Mexican. To be clear, the Mexican food should be referred to as Tex-Mex as it different from what they eat in Mexico and the lame stuff they call Mexican food on the west coast. So far, the majority of my meals have come from one of these two categories. Saturday night we went to an upscale Mexican restaurant where you basically pay a little more to sit in a nice atmosphere and eat the same thing you would in a Cantina, but still very good. Sunday night we went back to the old tried and true family Mexican restaurant Ninfa's. Ninfa, like many restaurant owners turned her ability to cook for a large extended family into a chain of restaurants here in Houston in the 70's. She passed away last year but the restaurants are still around.

For lunch we are heading to Goode Company BBQ. Jim Goode has turned his talent for making a great BBQ sauce into a chain of BBQ and seafood restaurants. As you might have guessed, we are not totally against chain restaurants here in Texas, as long as we know the person who started them and we can still go down to the original place they started. Tomorrow I will hit Otto's BBQ, George Bush Sr.'s favorite BBQ place in Houston. On this one issue I may have to agree with him. Then on the way to San Antonio I am sure I will hit another of the 100 best BBQ spots in Texas for lunch. Every small town has a great BBQ restaurant so the picking is easy.

In case you don't know, San Antonio is mostly populated by Mexican-Americans, so guess what I'll be eating there! After a few days the pendulum will have swung too far to Mexican and I'll have to get a little more BBQ in Houston before I fly home to Portland where I will go back to eating sushi.

I guess this is a long way of saying, you can't live on one kind of food.